Discussion

Humin is designed to be a new contextual phone app that captures all of your relationships and remembers people the same way you think about them. The product is built on a smarter search (think page rank for people) that let's you search everyone in your network with terms like "Met last week" or "Works at Product Hunt."
After a year and a half of development, we're thrilled that Humin is live! We launched today, so go download it and AMA.

@eriktorenberg thanks! I can address #1... (we're not really commenting on #2 yet)
There have been more than a few attempts at solving the "contacts problem" over the years. I think the mindset for past attempts well intentioned, but flawed. You can't just aggregate all of your FB, LI, contacts etc into one place... the result is chaotic and irrelevant. CONTEXT is really the key here, being able to sort through massive amounts of data and deliver only the results that matter to you right now. I also don't think people really think about using an "address book" (I'll bet your contacts app on iPhone is buried pretty deep) so we rebuilt the phone app instead.

@jtriest I do this with any new app that I'm trying out and that I think could be valuable... just move it to your home screen. Make sure to activate voicemail in Humin as well so you don't get pinged back over to the native app.
Also, try adding a new contact in Humin as well. Many people refuse to go back after they see how we Huminize new connections.

I received a Humin email the other day. I thought it was rather unprofessional for someone to use a service to verify whether they had my correct info or not instead of just using their words or sending an email.

@kchau Hey Kevin. For those with a large number of contacts, cleaning up out of date personal details with one-to-one personal emails would be too overwhelming to even consider. The good news is, you don't have to download Humin to verify your info for them, you can do it right on the web. I feel bad that your experience wasn't great, but know that we're improving this feature every day.

@lanewood I get that, but don't make it sound so canned. With the vast amount of information you get from the user, there is the option to personalize it and make it not so robotic. I would never use this "clean-up" feature because all of the contacts related to my work are high touch and personalized.
It wouldn't be hard to do something sent from {{user_email}} and:
Hey {{contact_first_name}},
I started using the Humin app and am in the process of cleaning up my contacts. I wanted to reach out and verify that I had the correct info for you in case I needed to reach out in the future. Here's what I have:
{{contact_email}}
{{contact_email_alt}}
{{contact_phone}}
Thanks a bunch!
{{user_first_name}}
See where I'm coming from?

@kchau This was a major turn-off for me. I'm a growth marketer and understand the need to get mass adoption for something like this, but spamming my contacts under the guise of verifying them with an email like this is not cool.
Also, don't send me a push notification telling me to put it in the bottom row on my phone. If you prove your value to me, I will happily do it on my own.
I'm an early adopter and therefore pretty lenient when it comes to trying new stuff, but these two things really turned me off to this app. Curious to hear your thoughts on this @lanewood.

@lylemckeany assuming that we built the verify only for growth just isn't accurate. But I would've been annoyed as well, so I get it. There's a reason why no one has solved the contacts problem yet. It's incredibly complicated. One big cause for that is that each one of us has so much out of date, mis-typed or just flat-out-wrong info in our contacts. The verify feature was something we knew was going to be touchy. We spent a lot of time on logic for emails going out to try to reduce any feeling of intrusiveness. We didn't get it right at first, but what exists now is 100x better than what we started with. We'll always be improving it. That's why we tested it for so long before we went live.
Also, the push notification you mentioned doesn't exist anymore. All of these fixes are thanks to feedback from our early access users. I'm beta testing two friends' apps right now, and there's a lot that needs to be fixed. I keep an Evernote file of all the things that annoy me and send every couple of days.
Hopefully that helps clear things up a bit, but feel free to hit me back with any thoughts.